A "real man's ring": gender and the invention of tradition - American double ring ceremony, 1920s male engagement ring

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2003 by Vicki Howard

The industry knew it had a vested interest in wedding customs that involved jewelry purchases and united in national campaigns to promote new traditions that required their expert, specialized services. Beginning in the 1920s, jewelers and their professional associations began running national campaigns to promote branded diamond engagement rings using national advertising and trade campaigns, tie-ins with Hollywood movies, and various merchandising schemes. Movie stills of wedding scenes were used in advertisements, such as the wedding scene from the 1927 Universal picture, "Butterflies in the Rain," which promoted Bristol Seamless bride and groom rings (figure 1). (10)

By the 1920s, the industry began paying attention to the groom. Jewelry manufacturer catalogs increasingly offered wedding bands for the groom, and specialty jewelers and department stores began advertising them." In 1926, manufacturers and retail jewelers launched a major campaign to popularize the custom of male engagement or betrothal rings. As the enthusiastic campaign got underway, Jewelers' Circular called for the appointment of a committee to organize the merchandizing and advertising program. Ring manufacturers participated in the campaign through radio advertising and by sending out newspaper electrotypes to be used by jewelers across the country. Window displays of men's engagement rings also tied in with this advertising. The campaign created networks of jewelers working co-operatively to put "this immense idea into the public consciousness." (12)

This 1926 male engagement ring campaign drew on a gendered understanding of "tradition," one that served to legitimize a new consumer rite. Co-operative advertisements by Newark jewelers promoted the so-called "ancient custom" using a photograph of a male hand posed with a cigarette, a symbol of sophisticated modernity as well as phallic power (figure 2). The campaign called for a "bang-up merchandising man" to design a window-display case of exhibit rings in rugged materials such as iron or bronze, like those worn by men in suitably heroic times, such as "in the ancient Gallic, Roman, Frankish and Pictish ages." The plan was to feature ads depicting pretty girls giving the rings, and "picture some 'he-men' wearing 'em." Advertisements for the male engagement ring used images of knights going into tournament or battle wearing a token ring. (13) Such ad copy and imagery showed that jewelers were trying to legitimize the male engagement ring as a heterosexual tradition.

To succeed in this campaign for the male engagement ring, jewelers had to educate the public and overturn social norms that linked jewelry with femininity. During the 1920s, advertising copy and style names for all types of rings for men cast these items in a particularly manly light. In general, such ring advertising tried to appeal to men through gendered language that signaled power and cultural authority. A ring like "The Major," a carved green gold ring with a blue-white diamond, was advertised as something "for the 'he-man' who appreciates true value." Men's rings that were not wedding-specific signaled their association with power or positions of authority through style names like the Pilot, the Advocate, the Master, the Executive, and the Stag. Men who wore them had sexual prowess; they were in leadership positions or were in control. (14) Such rings were not worn, at least openly, as symbols of marital status.